Contributors

For over a century, El Palacio has been a forum for voices exploring New Mexico’s art, archaeology, history, and landscape. Explore the writers, photographers, historians, and scientists whose perspectives have defined the magazine’s pages—past and present.

Arthur Sze

Arthur Sze is the current U.S. Poet Laureate. Sze is a poet, translator, and editor. He is the author of twelve books, including Into the Hush, Sight Lines, and others. Sze’s poems have been translated into fifteen languages, and he is the recipient of the National Book Award among many other honors. He lives in Santa Fe.

Deborah Jackson Taffa

Deborah Jackson Taffa is a citizen of the Quechan Nation and Laguna Pueblo. Her memoir Whiskey Tender was a 2024 National Book Award Finalist and was longlisted for the 2025 Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction. Taffa serves as the director of the MFA in creative writing program at the Institute of American Indian Arts.

Cara Romero

Cara Romero is an award-winning contemporary fine art photographer. An enrolled citizen of the Chemehuevi Indian Tribe, Romero’s expansive oeuvre has been informed by formal training in film, digital, fine art, and commercial photography. She maintains a studio in Santa Fe, regularly participates in Native American art fairs, and was featured in PBS’ Craft in America (2019).

J.C. Gonzo

J.C. Gonzo (opens in a new tab) is an artist based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. His focus lies in re-contextualizing social and environmental histories as a form of meta-ecological research. His reports are depicted through a variety of media, serving both as a referential document and a celebration of chaos in the natural world.

J.C. Gonzo. From the project A New Mexican Burial, 2020-2021.

Most Strange

By J.C. Gonzo "The child’s corpse was exposed to view, decked with rosettes of brilliant hues, and the mourners talked and laughed gaily, which seemed to me most strange,” noted Lieutenant James W. Abert in 1846, after witnessing a child’s funeral in Santa Fe. The deaths of recently baptized infants were to be celebrated—they enjoyed a sure path to heaven. I stumbled across the lieutenant’s statement in an old Santa Fe New Mexican article in spring 2020 while researching New Mexican cemeteries, a new photographic project I’d embarked upon.